(Spoilers for The Iron Claw will certainly be found below.)
A24 has debuted the first trailer for The Iron Claw, and it’s understatement to say that this movie looks intense. The trailer also didn’t shy away from making strong suggestions about the fate of Jeremy Allen White’s character, Kerry Von Erich, who might turn out to be the most intense (at least on screen) Von Erich family member of all. This will be a close competition, too, as anyone who is familiar with this wrestling family’s history knows, but given that White woke up after The Bear‘s first season with pile of A24 scripts awaiting him, it’s not hard to tell why they wanted White for this role.
Additionally, anyone who’s seen White as Lip Gallagher in Shameless knows he can layer the tragedy of a character alongside many moods, so he’s up for the task. The trailer does some heavy foreshadowing about Kerry, and at around 1:30, you can see his descent begin.
There’s no telling whether the motorcycle rider depicted here is the one that led to Kerry’s 1986 accident, which caused substantial injury to Kerry’s lower body and led to an amputated foot. This also took Kerry down the road to painkiller addiction, multiple arrests, and eventually, his suicide in 1993. This is one of several tragedies that befell the Von Erichs (led by the overbearing patriarch, Fritz), and in the trailer, Zac Efron’s Kevin Von Erich makes pointed mention of the rumored family curse. This included one of the six brothers dying in early childhood and untimely deaths for several other wrestling brothers in adulthood. Kevin is now the only Von Erich brother alive at age 66.
In other words, this movie will be much more than a bunch of jacked dudes for Christmas, but hey, at least we’ll get those jacked dudes.
The Iron Claw arrives in theaters on December 22.
